Griselda’s newest signee alternatingly embraces and cuts against the Buffalo collective’s throwback Mafioso rap.
Following a long hot streak that cemented the label’s hallowed standing in the most traditionally minded corners of hip-hop fandom, Griselda has entered the thorniest phase for any rap imprint: expansion. Hitherto a tight circle of brothers Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn and cousin Benny the Butcher, this summer the Buffalo, New York collective branched out with releases from Detroit signee Boldy James and Benny’s Black Soprano Family crew, neither of which threatened their reputation for quality control. Now comes the Griselda debut from Armani Caesar, the label’s self-billed “First Lady,” whose album The Liz Tape alternatingly embraces and cuts against Griselda’s throwback Mafioso rap with gusto.
Armani may not share the blood ties of Griselda’s founding trio, but her biography overlaps. She’s from Buffalo, and she was discovered by Griselda’s late producer DJ Shay, who signed her in 2009, so like Conway and company, she logged plenty of time in obscurity before finding her break. And since she’s on Griselda, it goes without saying that she’s got bars. “Hundred grand flow, chillin’ in the Lambo/Eight bands for the bag, two more on the sandals,” she spits on “Gucci Casket,” with a precision that recalls early Nicki Minaj, without the cartoonish embellishments that eventually turned Minaj’s pressure-cooker flow into shtick.
The Liz Tape spends its opening stretch proving just how well Armani belongs on the label, casting her crime tales against bruising loops and terse, Mobb Deep pianos—“Countdown” even throws in a Redman sample, old-head catnip in its most concentrated form. It also gives her plenty of chances to spar with Conway, Westside, and Benny, and she has a natural rapport with each of them. She’s the Sharon Stone in Casino to the label’s assorted De Niros and Pescis, the new arrival who fits in so naturally you could be convinced she was always part of the ensemble.
And yet, unlike her new labelmates, Armani isn’t a born outsider. As hard as The Liz Tape works to cast her as the Foxy Brown/Lil’ Kim of their crew, the lone woman who punches as hard as her male cohorts, her flows are too flashy and contemporary to be boxed in by Griselda’s East Coast classicism. Her wanderlust sets in on the record’s second half, where she begins to sound less like a Griselda lifer than a talented ringer who saw an opportunity. There’s a sense that, left to her own devices, she’d rather play in 21 Savage and Megan Thee Stallion’s sandbox than Roc Marciano’s, especially on “Yum Yum,” the first ever straight-up strip-club track on a Griselda release.
The Liz Tape stacks its best songs back to back, and they show off her dueling sides. The DJ Premier-produced “Simply Done” is a golden-age fever dream, a frenzy of hard bars, kinetic loops, samples, and scratches—it’s thrilling, in that perfectly predictable way that every first new DJ Premier track you’ve heard in a while is thrilling. “Drill a RaMa,” on the other hand, disposes with ’93-era New York in favor of Atlanta circa now, with Armani and Benny firing off twisty triplet flows and clearly relishing the breather from Griselda’s usual boom-bap.
It’s a rare rapper who’s equally equipped to crush both tracks. By now, Griselda is so established as a trio that some fans may be inclined to write off a newcomer like Armani as a second-tier member. But it’s her willingness to shake things up that makes her such a valuable addition to a crew that, despite its impressive track record, can sometimes be blinded by its reverence for rap’s past. A little modernity looks good on them.
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